


The Dragon-Headed Door

by Lomonaaeren



Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2019 [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 2: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Fluff, Gen, Harry Potter was Raised by Other(s), Humor, Present Tense, Warrior Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-26 13:04:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21374605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: The second half of goblin-raised Harry’s second year and the first half of his third year at Hogwarts. Featuring cursed diaries, humans who don’t take a hint, starving dogs, and werewolves who for some reason want to keep it a secret. Oh, and what’s probably the beginning of the next goblin rebellion.
Relationships: Filius Flitwick & Harry Potter, Goblins & Harry Potter, Harry Potter & Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood & Harry Potter
Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2019 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1532687
Comments: 305
Kudos: 3456





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year and is the sequel to “Music Beneath the Mountains” and “In Their Own Secret Tongues He Spoke.” The title of the fic and section titles are from Tolkien’s poems “The Shores of Faery and “The Last Voyage of Earendel.”

_Gateway of the Moon_

Harry frowns at the door that stands in front of him. It’s not one that he’s ever seen before, but then again, he hasn’t come this far back in the Realm of Song, either. He mostly stays in the caverns and ravines near the surface.

But this morning he found a river of liquid mercury, which pleased him so much that he cast some protection spells and followed it. He expected to find the headwaters in a lake of pure silver or someone’s forge. He didn’t expect the mercury to be running from under a door.

It’s an _enormous _door, the kind of thing the Deep Ones would have built if they could build. The edges are hewn roughly out of basalt, but otherwise it looks like a giant boulder just set in the middle of a gap in the rock.

Well, the edges and the dragon’s head sticking out of the middle are probably carved, Harry has to concede. He takes a little step to the side to see the dragon’s head better. It reminds him of the basilisk’s that still hangs in the grove of honored enemies, but this is made entirely of stone. It has enough spikes that he thinks it’s meant to be a Hungarian Horntail. The eyes are closed and the muzzle projects forwards and fangs are visible around the edges of the mouth. Harry knows goblins could have created it, but it isn’t like his people to be this crude.

He already tried to use a few wizard spells on it, and to speak to the stone and hear back from it in the language of the goblins. Neither helped. The stone is aware, but it’s a _sleeping _awareness, Harry thinks. He doesn’t know how to wake it up.

Thoughtful, he goes back up towards the surface. Someone has to know what this thing is and how to open the door.

*

“You should not go near that door.”

Harry carefully examines Toothsplitter’s face. It’s not often that the Master Smith who raised him to journeyman a year ago speaks so seriously. And a warning of danger is not usually given, not when that would be an insult to another goblin’s fighting prowess. “Why not?” Harry asks, he thinks sensibly enough.

Toothsplitter sighs and puts down her hammer. Harry sits up from the edge of the carven stone seat where he’s been watching her work. It’s _grave_, then.

“I know you think the Deep Ones are the major enemies of goblins in the Realm of Song,” Toothsplitter begins. She pours him a mug of cool, gold-accented water. Harry accepts eagerly, and watches as Toothsplitter drinks from her own stone cup. He can see swirls of yellow near the top of hers. “But there were are other enemies.”

“Are or were?”

Toothsplitter toasts him with her mug. “They are both. We sealed them behind that door long ago, and so they only _were _our enemies, in a sense. But we couldn’t kill them. We had to put them to sleep. So they are.”

Harry sips thoughtfully from his cup, and appreciates the gold swirling around his mouth. He likes it better in drinks than in solids like biscuits. “I can appreciate that. But why is the door left unguarded?”

“Most young goblins never venture that far into the Realm of Song, Harry. You know that.”

It still makes a warm _carazah _spring to life in Harry’s chest that Toothsplitter and the others consider him a goblin. He finishes the water and nods. “Okay. Can I tell anyone else about this?”

“We do not want other youngsters getting ideas.”

“I meant my friend Luna, at Hogwarts.”

“Oh, the one who listens to animals.” Toothsplitter thinks about it while she strokes her forge, which is murmuring complaints about being left unused for so long in the middle of the afternoon. “Yes, I think that would be acceptable. But keep in mind that the situation is delicate right now, with war in the cave mouth if we don’t get straight answers from your Headmaster, so you will still want to warn her not to spread it around.”

Harry smiles, and he knows it’s sad. “That’s okay, Toothsplitter. Most of the time, no one listens to Luna anyway.”

*

“A dragon-headed door? How exciting!” Luna is bouncing gently on her feet as Harry finishes his story. They’re out in the Forbidden Forest, where they’ve just finished another language lesson with the thestrals. Harry is getting quite good at understanding them now, which makes both him and Luna proud. “I wonder if it’s like the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets here.”

“I don’t know, Luna.” Harry casts a Warming Charm. Luna is barefoot and gets uncomfortable when Harry asks her about it, so Harry uses lots of spells. “But probably not. I don’t think the enemies behind the door are basilisks, or there would be more basilisk heads in the crystal grove at home.”

Luna sniffles for a second. Harry told her about the basilisk’s funeral his first day back from hols, and she thought it was the most wonderful thing she ever heard. “But no, I didn’t mean that. I mean that someone must have been releasing the basilisk, right?”

Harry opens his mouth to argue that the basilisk was intelligent enough to crawl around the school on its own, then pauses. Luna is right. Why would it only get out _now _if it could always get out?

Grimly, Harry adjusts the hang of his knife on his belt. That means there’s an enemy out there, one he has to defend his humans and his stones and his objects in the school from. All his friends deserve to be safe.

“How are we going to find out if there is?” he asks.

“We have to listen to the animals,” Luna says earnestly. “Did you know that spiders are afraid of basilisks? They’re mortal enemies. We can ask them about it.”

“I don’t think you speak the language of spiders, though, do you?” That was one reason they had stayed away from the Acromantulas in the Forest so far, because Luna had admitted, a little ashamed, that she didn’t speak their tongue.

“Silly.” Luna beams at him. “All we have to do is learn it.”

Harry doesn’t really know why people bully Luna and say she’s stupid. She has the most common sense of any human he knows.

*

It actually takes more of the term to learn the language of spiders than Harry thought. It turns out to be full of vibrations that you can only make on a web, and so he and Luna have to study charms to make silk first. And the spiderwebs themselves, unfortunately, aren’t the kind of objects that talk to a goblin. Those are the ones like metal and stone and porcelain that were unalive first and come out of the earth. Ones that come right out of living beings tend to be mute.

But once they do start learning, it’s so simple that Harry wants to laugh. Luna even told him something last term about her friend Ginny and how she was acting strange, not like she did when they were children together and Luna knew her. The spiders are full of tales about her sneaking around—or, as they put it, vibration to the left-vibration to the right-two quick taps of the four feet in the middle.

So now they’re near the entrance to the Chamber in the old bathroom where Ginny comes all the time, waiting for her. Harry doesn’t know why the thing that’s making her act strange, whatever it is, wants her to keep going to the Chamber when there’s no basilisk down there anymore, but it’s not as if Snape makes sense on a regular basis, either. So maybe an evil object, or person, or spirit, whichever it is, doesn’t have to make sense.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry looks over his shoulder. The ghost, Moaning Myrtle, who he met once before is floating behind him, her arms crossed. She nods to Harry. “_You _said that you were going to honor me as a fallen enemy. But you never came back to do that.”

“I’m sorry, Myrtle,” Harry says, and bows to her. Maybe she knows something about goblins, because her eyes brighten in a way that says she knows just how deeply she’s been honored. “But you do have to have a battle with me first, so that you can actually be my enemy. Right now, you haven’t done that.”

“That’s right. I remember you saying something about that.” Myrtle chews her transparent lip with silvery teeth. “Can I fight you now?”

“Right now, we’re waiting for a different kind of enemy. But you can watch the battle if you want. Maybe that’ll give you some ideas about how you want to be honored?”

“You’re so _nice_, Harry Potter,” Myrtle says, floating up so that she sits on top of one of the cubicles. “No one else has ever been so nice to me.” Tears well up in her eyes and dangle there, ready to fall.

“I know, he’s very nice,” Luna says calmly. “Not many people listen to me or help me, either, but Harry does. It’s because he’s a goblin, you know.”

“By adoption,” Harry adds, when Myrtle studies him as if she expects to see that he’s a half-goblin like Professor Flitwick. She must not know that much about goblins after all. “But they’re my true people.”

“If all goblins are this nice, then more power to goblins.”

Harry smiles and starts to say something, but then Luna touches his arm. Harry turns around and listens. Yes, Luna’s right. Someone’s creeping down the corridor, and they’re trying to be quiet, but they haven’t taken that much care. Any experienced warrior could hear them.

“Excuse us, Myrtle,” Harry says politely, taking out his daggers. “We have an enemy to fight.”

“Yes, do let me watch!” Myrtle leans forwards with her elbows propped on the top of the cubicle wall and her hands folded under her chin.

Luna moves out and stands in front of the door, while Harry ducks under the sink that has a snake on it. They both agreed it would be best if Ginny saw Luna first, someone she likes and has no reason to hurt, and wouldn’t suspect of setting an ambush.

Ginny comes in through the door, and still looks stunned when she sees Luna. She blinks and clutches something under her robes. With a bit of squinting, Harry can make out the hard square edges of something that looks like a book, which he has to admit isn’t what he expected. “Luna? What are you doing here?”

“I come here and speak with Myrtle sometimes,” Luna says, and for all Harry knows, it’s true. There are still strange and wonderful secrets about Luna. He doesn’t know everything about his friend. Luna blinks back at Ginny and adds, “What are _you_ doing here, Ginny?”

“I—I need a private place to brew potions. I’m not very good at them, and Professor Snape makes me nervous when he insults them.”

Harry frowns. He doesn’t share Potions classes with the Gryffindors, and he heard about Snape bullying Neville Longbottom, but he didn’t realize it was general bullying with all Gryffindors. He’ll have to do something about that.

Then he remembers that Ginny is probably being influenced by some kind of evil thing, and that’s the more pressing problem. “Where’s your cauldron?” he asks casually, thinking he might be able to get close to her and wave an enchanted knife that would disrupt the spell. “I’ll help you get set up.”

“Um, um, it’s shrunken and in my pocket.” Weasley’s eyes are darting anxiously back and forth between him and Luna, and she has one hand on something in her pocket that’s probably not a cauldron. The square thing that looks like a book, Harry thinks. “I prefer privacy, really, so could you…”

“We know that you have Wrackspurts in your head, Ginny,” Luna says, a lot more gently than Harry would think she could. “We’re just trying to help you get rid of them.”

Weasley’s eyes grow desperate, and she pulls out the book and hurls it at their heads. Harry pulls Luna to the side, shaking his head when she doesn’t duck and the book soars past them to land in a puddle. Weasley is already running away. “Why didn’t you duck, Luna?”

“Because I knew you would save me.”

Harry sighs. Well, it’s true, he has to admit as he goes to pick up the book. It’s just not the kind of lesson that _he _would take from the situation, not when he’s been trained in the self-reliant ways of goblins since before he could walk.

He frowns as he turns the book over and sees the initials _T.M.R. _embossed on the surface. That argues that it’s not Ginny’s book. It sorts of looks like a diary, which probably belongs to this T.M.R. person. Still, when he opens it, it’s full of delicate handwriting.

“That’s Ginny’s handwriting,” Luna volunteers, looking over his shoulder.

Harry nods, trusting her impression of it. “Do you want to go tell the professors?” It’s not what he would prefer to do, but he’s trying to fit better into human culture.

Luna looks at him as if he’s a little thick, which Harry does sometimes feel like. “Not when it would get Ginny in trouble. And not when we might have to explain how we learned it.”

Harry winces. He hadn’t thought of that. Ordinary humans don’t believe that animals can really talk. They won’t listen to people who claimed that they learned the language of spiders.

He nods again. “Then I’ll keep this for right now,” he says, and drops the book into a pocket, “until we can determine what to do with it.”

_ East of the Moon_

Harry opens his eyes and stands up with his hands resting on his daggers. There’s been something buzzing and nagging at his dreams for a few nights now. He’s ignored it because it’s elusive and flees when he turns to confront it. This way, it’ll have to come out and reveal itself.

And it has, but it’s not something Harry would have expected. A boy who looks about sixteen or so stands up from leaning against a dark doorway that is not a place Harry would have imagined when awake. He has a pale face and dark hair that it looks like he spends a lot of time on. “Hello. I thought you would never hear me.”

“I heard you, but I didn’t understand what you were saying,” Harry explains as he studies the boy. He doesn’t carry weapons, not even a wand, but he stands as though he’s used to fighting. That makes Harry cautious. Either his demeanor is justified or it’s arrogance, and either way, in a human, that’s trouble.

“Well, then. My name is Tom Marvolo Riddle.”

“The owner of the diary?”

“Yes, indeed. And I am most anxious to make your acquaintance…” Riddle lets the words trail off suggestively.

“Sorry, but I’m a goblin, and if you don’t know my name yet, I don’t think I should give it.” That’s not a luxury Harry has most of the time, since almost everyone knows who he is the second they see his forehead. But he’s going to take advantage of it for all he’s worth when he does meet someone who doesn’t know.

Not to mention, someone who might be an enemy.

“You’re not a goblin,” Riddle says, his forehead wrinkling. Harry takes a hard look at it, but he doesn’t have runes carved into it that might account for the sense of heavy darkness around them. Too bad. He must be causing this some other way. “Nor a half-goblin. You’re too tall.”

Harry sighs. It seems that so many wizards fail to understand this. He thinks he’s because they’re obsessed by blood purity and everyone being _related _to each other, and don’t understand other forms of relation. “I’m an adopted goblin. My parents died when I was young, and the goblins found and raised me.”

“So you were raised by non-humans.”

The way that last word rolls off Riddle’s tongue raises hair all over Harry’s body. He drops his hands to the hilts of his daggers but tries to smile to show his teeth. Riddle hasn’t been any more insulting than other people—yet. He deserves some warning before Harry attacks. “Yes.”

“And you _wanted _to remain with them?”

Harry shrugs. “Well, like I said, my parents were dead. There weren’t any other humans that had any kind of claim to me. Well, technically there were, but we took care of it with some paperwork. Humans don’t pay a lot of attention to what they’re signing when it comes from Gringotts.”

“You’re speaking as if…” Riddle studies him and stands up from his lounging posture against the doorway. He circles around to the side. Harry turns with him. He’s too well-trained to let another duelist have the advantage.

“And you’re speaking as if you have some kind of grudge against goblins. Let’s hear about it.” Harry is impatient with human society and its lies most of the time, but doubly so now. Does Riddle really think he can fool Harry about his nature?

“You’re speaking as if you’re proud of it,” Riddle says, which at least does bring the answer out into the open, although it doesn’t make Harry any fonder of him. “You’re a _wizard._”

“And a goblin.”

“You’re human.”

“And a goblin.”

Riddle looks the way that some of Harry’s Housemates do when they realize that Harry can just ask his sheets to make themselves and they’ll do it. “But you’re talented in _magic._“

“And a goblin.” Harry is starting to wonder if Riddle’s fallen prey to the common misconception that humans have more magic, or some fundamentally more powerful kind of magic, than goblins. It’s not entirely unknown to Harry, although it’s still stupid as whistling when you stand under a ledge of echostone.

“You will stop saying that. You will give me your answer. _What is your name_?”

The words echo in Harry’s ears, and they might sway him, but he’s had practice at throwing off the whispering blandishments of the Deep Ones by now. He draws his daggers. “Get out of my head, Tom Riddle.”

“You should call me by my other name,” Riddle breathes, although Harry doesn’t think he imagined the flash of fear in those dark eyes when the other boy’s attempt to control Harry failed. “The name that I have made myself feared under.”

“The Bloke Who Babbles Too Much?”

Riddle lunges at him with a snarl, but then the dream world dissolves, and Harry finds himself back in his bed. The diary has squirmed out from under the bed, though, and is lying on the pillow next to him, smoking furiously.

Harry has had about enough of the thing, and he thinks that he doesn’t need to keep it around to figure out how it influenced Ginny Weasley anymore; the diary’s ability to invade his dreams pretty much proves how that happened. He takes his daggers and stabs the bloody thing.

_O’er the Darkness_

“Now, Harry, I want you to tell me exactly what happened when you stabbed this diary that you claim was speaking to you.”

Harry sighs. He’s been over this with Headmaster Dumbledore seven times now. And they have Luna’s testimony and even the teary words of Ginny Weasley, who apparently broke away from Riddle’s enchantment the instant Harry destroyed the diary.

“I stabbed the diary with my daggers,” he says anyway, because fighting a human who keeps asking silly questions is beneath him. “It started to smoke, and a large hole appeared in the center of it.”

“And your bed began to smoke, too.”

“Yes. Then I stabbed the diary again to be sure, and black blood, or at least a substance _like _blood, began to come out of it.” Harry tried to compare the black liquid to coal tar at first, but everyone except Professor Flitwick made it clear they had no idea what he was talking about, so Harry gave up. Honestly, don’t they pay attention to _anything _important, like mining?

“But your bed caught on fire.”

That appears to be the point that Dumbledore is hung up on. Harry gives him the most patient look he can. “Well, yes. It had a magical fire burning in the middle of it. Or at least the diary was smoking, and the diary was lying on the bed, so—”

“Why did the diary smoke when you stabbed it with a dagger?” Snape interrupts. Harry has no idea why he’s here at all. At least Professor Flitwick is the Head of His House and Professor McGonagall is Deputy Headmistress, but Dumbledore apparently invited Snape because he’s afraid to be the only annoying person in the room.

Harry just looks at him for a long moment. Technically he doesn’t have to answer Snape at all. He issued a challenge to a duel last year and Snape refused it. Harry doesn’t have to speak with cowards, under goblin law.

“Harry.” Dumbledore sounds an inch away from sighing. “Please answer Professor Snape.”

In the end, Harry shrugs and does so. He supposes that it won’t cost him more pride or dignity than he’s already lost. “The diary was Dark magic, and one of my daggers is made from a basilisk fang. I assume it was the potency of the venom that ate through it.”

Snape actually jerks back and turns pale. Harry raises a curious eyebrow. Then he remembers that he threatened Snape with his daggers on more than one occasion, and grins. Yes, Snape’s probably thinking about how he could have been stabbed with a basilisk fang himself.

“Harry,” Dumbledore sighs, aloud this time, and from the expression on his face, he knows what he’s going to say next will do no good. “I _must _ask you not to carry basilisk fangs around.”

“Where does it say I can’t in the School’s Charter, sir?”

Dumbledore struggles for a long moment. Harry thinks it’s against his own impulse to reach over the desk and slap Harry. That’s too bad, though, because he earned this when he lied and made excuses. Harry waits, face fixed in the angelic expression that is making Professor Flitwick cough behind his hand.

Dumbledore finally says, “It doesn’t. Nonetheless—”

Professor McGonagall decides to add herself to the annoying list then. Harry wants to shake his head mournfully. He could have warned her that too great a commitment to the rules would get her in trouble. “The Charter _does _say that lethal weapons cannot be carried, Mr. Potter.”

“You mean, other than wands?”

“_Mr. Potter_—”

“A wand can cast the Killing Curse,” Harry says, and keeps his eyes very wide as he reaches up to flip the fringe back from the scar. “I have reason to know that.” He waits for the count of two, to be effective, before he flips the fringe back down and continues in his normal voice. “Besides, Professor, if you look at the Charter, you’ll find that it says _human _students can’t carry lethal weapons. I’m a goblin.”

“There are no exceptions for non-human students,” Professor McGonagall says, at the same time that Snape mutters, “You are not a goblin.”

“I’ve already given you my answer to that, which you aren’t courageous enough to accept,” Harry told Snape, and faced Professor McGonagall with a faint smile. “As a matter of fact, Professor, there are. A half-troll student can have a club, for instance, and half-Veela students are allowed to Transfigure their hands into claws. It’s cultural.”

“Whether it is appropriate according to the Charter or not,” Dumbledore interrupts, his voice stern, “the fact remains that you cannot carry a basilisk fang made into a dagger around this school, Harry.”

“Oh, you can take my weapons.”

“Thank you for under—”

“If you duel me for them, and win.” Harry stood up and fell into an expectant stance. “Of course, my weapons shall be my daggers. You can have your wand if you want. It doesn’t make much difference to me.”

“_Insolent_,” Snape breathes, while Dumbledore just looks despairing.

“You are human, Mr. Potter.” Professor McGonagall says it with a little sigh, as if she doesn’t really expect Harry to listen to her and might not blame him if he doesn’t.

“If you wanted me to stay human, you should have left me with humans who would take care of me and call me by name and not make me sleep in a cupboard and care about me enough that I couldn’t just wander off on my own when I was six years old.”

Professor McGonagall stares at him. Then she turns to face Dumbledore. “The Muggles he was with did that to him?”

“I don’t see how it matters now, Minerva.” Dumbledore just flaps a hand without taking his gaze from Harry. Harry conceals a vicious smile as he watches the disapproval creep across Professor McGonagall’s face. Dumbledore just lost the loyalty of one of the most important people to him, and he didn’t _notice._

“Right now,” Dumbledore goes on, “we’re settling the question of what happened when Mr. Potter stabbed that diary.”

Harry shrugs. “I don’t see how it matters. It burned up. It started a fire that I put out without the Ravenclaw Tower being damaged. The end. Why does it _have _to be more involved than that?”

This time, Dumbledore sighs as if it physically pains him to give up information. “Because Tom Marvolo Riddle is the mortal name of Lord Voldemort.”

Harry blinks, then shrugs. “Well, he should put stronger defenses on his bits of soul or whatever he’s leaving lying around.”

Dumbledore’s face gets pinched. “Mr. Potter—”

Harry points to Professor McGonagall and Snape. “What? You didn’t want them to know about this? But I think it’s obvious. After all, there was a piece of soul behind my scar that the goblins removed, so it stands to reason that he probably left more than one scattered around.”

The conversation goes rapidly downhill from there.

*

“And he said directly that you are lying?” Toothsplitter is leaning forwards with a fanatical light in her eyes.

“Yes, he did.” Professor Flitwick looks upset as he sips his cup of _pure _molten copper. Harry is beyond impressed with his professor’s digestion. “Albus seems to believe that the impact of this knowledge is going to change the entire game.”

“Game?” Harry blinks.

“Excuse me, Mr. Potter. The political game. The engagement of opponents on the political battlefield,” Professor Flitwick adds, since both Harry and Toothsplitter have puzzled expressions.

“Games are things children play,” Toothsplitter points out sharply. “They have nothing to do with lives or politics. If this professor thinks that he may play with goblin lives, he will find out the difference between us and children quickly.”

Flitwick sighs and nods. “I’m afraid that humans think differently and frequently confuse goblins with children in way that have nothing to do with our size, Madam Toothsplitter.” Harry is pleased by the use of “our.” “They assume that we think about the world in simple ways and that means that we can be fooled.”

“But—thinking simply means it’s hard to fool you,” Harry says. He wonders if this is another one of those confusing human things, because it seems impossible that smart adult humans don’t understand something Harry has known since he was six. “Because you look at their complicated explanations and you pierce through them and see to the heart.”

“Some people think complicated is better.” Professor Flitwick appears pained. “Or that anyone who doesn’t use the same metaphors and the same kinds of approvals and governments that humans do is primitive and backward.”

“Let them think that.” Toothsplitter flicks her claws together. “That means they will be all the more unprepared when war comes upon them.”

“It is to be war, then?” Professor Flitwick glances back and forth between them in resignation. “This is something that cannot be avoided?”

“Why would we want to avoid it?” Harry points out. “They have accused me of lying. They tried to control a goblin. The school as a whole is run by people who don’t respect goblins and think that their tangled explanations should control my life. This is something we _should _address.”

“But the other goblin rebellions haven’t—worked out well for our people.”

Toothsplitter smiles, revealing the teeth she’s sharpened into fangs since Harry came back for the summer. Everyone prepares for war in their own way. “You’ve been reading too much of the human side of history, Master Filius. You should ask yourself what those rebellions were meant to achieve.”

“Respect, I thought. But the humans don’t show it even now.”

“Oh, that generation at the time did,” Toothsplitter says. “It’s just that humans live such short lives they need to be taught anew every few decades.”

Flitwick looks pained. “I didn’t think I would live through another goblin rebellion.”

“Well,” Toothsplitter says. “Now you have. And what side are you going to choose?”

Harry looks at Flitwick in some curiosity to see how he’ll answer that. His loyalties aren’t as simple as Harry’s. He’s a half-goblin, and Harry is wholly goblin, and so Harry can’t blame Flitwick if he feels torn, he supposes. But it would be brilliant to be on the same side as him.

Flitwick looks back and forth between them for a moment, and then shakes his head. “One can hardly say that Mr. Potter didn’t give the Headmaster fair warning. I’m on your side in this war, until the end.” And he repeats it in Gobbledegook to prove he means it.

Harry is smiling as he gets up to shake hands with Professor Flitwick. “I promise that you’re not going to regret it, sir.”

“I hope not, either.” Flitwick’s hand squeezes his, hard. Then he sits back and picks up his cup of molten copper again. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Potter, Professor Dumbledore was most interested in what you did with the diary you destroyed.”

“I found a safe place for it,” Harry says innocently. He avoids Toothsplitter’s eye, but then again, she would say it was safe enough as long as he didn’t get caught, and Harry didn’t.

*

He followed that river of mercury that flowed up to the dragon-headed door the day that began the summer holidays. He stood before it, studying it, for long moments. Then he spoke the words that would guarantee that it could open.

Those words aren’t a secret. Young goblins can learn them if they want. Of course, if a young goblin uses them and the door opens and swallows them, that proves they shouldn’t have used them after all.

The dragon-headed door swung open for Harry. He didn’t look into the darkness behind it or wait for something to come forth. Instead, he threw the diary into the gap and then spoke the words that closed the door again. It seemed to him that it moved much more reluctantly back into place than it opened.

But the important thing was that the door had accepted the diary, and so had the enemies of the goblins that lived behind it. It’s probably true that those things still hate goblins, but they would hardly accept the dominance of the arrogant shade that lived in the diary, assuming anything is left.

And Harry truly doesn’t think there is. Basilisk venom is good at destroying things.

Still, he leaves the door behind with a lighter heart.


	2. Chapter 2

“Harrikins! Didn’t you hear the news? Should you be alone without—”

“A guard, at least? We thought you’d have at least a dozen Aurors following you.”

Harry turns around to grin at Fred and George. He and Luna have come to Diagon Alley to buy their supplies for the upcoming school year, and he’s not really surprised to see the Weasley twins there, too. They do seem to get everywhere. “Hullo, Fred and George. Aurors are like the wizards who guard against Dark Arts, right?”

“Yes, of—”

“Course they are.” Fred looks chiding. “Don’t try to tell us that you’re stupid, Harrikins. You must realize what an Auror is.”

“I don’t pay attention to things I don’t need to pay attention to,” Harry tells them, which is only the truth but makes them look at him slowly and carefully anyway. Harry shakes his head in amusement. “There are so many other voices in the world to listen to, and I have my daggers, you know.”

“You have to pay attention to this, Harrikins.” Suddenly Fred and George’s voices are low and they’re both crowding around him, which is worrisome. They sound almost as low as the stones that speak at home when they’re trying to whisper secrets so not everyone can hear. “Sirius Black is on the loose.”

“Who?” Harry asks brightly, when there’s an ominous pause and it’s evident that they expect him to shriek madly and fall on the ground.

Fred sighs. “He was the one—”

“Who betrayed your parents to You-Know-Who,” George finishes.

Harry is about to say that he doesn’t know who before he remembers that ridiculous idea about not uttering Voldemort’s name. He shrugs a little. “All right. And?”

“He’s broken out of prison,” George says.

“He’s coming after you,” Fred says, and even though he twists his face into a ghoulish mask, Harry thinks he’s serious, and worried. “He probably wants to finish the job. He didn’t get to kill you the first time and neither did his master, so he wants to track you down, see?”

“That doesn’t worry me.”

“Harry, the Blacks got up to some _terrible _Dark magic,” George says.

“George, you don’t think anything is terrible.”

“So consider who’s saying it.” Fred narrows his eyes at Harry, and his voice is sharp. “We don’t want him to capture you. None of the Aurors have been able to find him yet. That means you _have _to be careful. He could pop up right behind you and use some spell that you don’t need to counteract.”

“That’s assuming I don’t stab him in the groin with a basilisk fang before he can,” Harry counters calmly.

“You have a _basilisk _fang?” George exclaims, and goes back to looking more like himself, which is a relief. Harry doesn’t know what to do with serious twins. “Wicked!”

“We heard rumors, but we didn’t know.” Fred stares in respect at the silver-tipped fang that Harry pulls out of his belt, but doesn’t try to touch it, which pleases Harry. It means that his lectures about listening to objects must be getting through to the twins. “Does it talk to you?”

“Everything talks,” Harry points out. The lectures haven’t sunk _all _the way in, obviously. “But I must admit this dagger is pretty quiet. Most of the time it mutters to itself about old stone and the pain of growing out of the gum of a basilisk’s mouth. And stillness. I think the basilisk spent a lot of time sleeping.”

“Maybe it will be effective against Sirius Black, at that,” Fred admits, and then straightens and looks down at him. “But as Percy the Prefect would say, no going off on your own, Mr. Potter.”

“Oh, is Percy a prefect?” Harry asks.

“Don’t worry, he’ll tell you himself!” George exclaims, and waves their brother down at the same moment as Luna comes out of the potions ingredients shop with a number of live beetles that she intends to name and raise, she tells Harry, instead of letting them become the base of potions as they were intended to be. Harry approves.

He also approves of Percy’s prefect badge, which has a lot of stories to tell about exciting midnight chases through the corridors. Maybe they’ll even find some new secret passages that way.

_Stands A Lone_

Harry stands up with a frown when he sees the darkness show up outside the train compartment he and Luna are in and feels the whole train start to slow down. That shouldn’t happen. And neither should the sharp groaning of metal that means the train is feeling cold.

Harry only knows a few creatures who could cause cold like that, and only one who would be roaming around outside the train, or on the train.

Dementors, looking for Sirius Black.

Luna shivers next to him and huddles back into a corner of the compartment. Harry glances at her in quick concern, but she manages to smile at him even though her lips are blue.

“It’s all right, Harry. I’m sure that they must have good in them somewhere, like all creatures. And they don’t _mean _to cause me to relive the death of my mother.” But Luna buries her face in her arms, and her brave words trail off.

Harry turns around to face the door. That’s it. He’s going to get the Dementors off the train, for Luna.

He reaches out and puts his hand on the wall of the compartment, near the door. He ignores the groaning and shrieking of the cold metal and the memories that want to rise up in his mind. Honestly, he doesn’t have that many bad memories. Most of them are from before the time he became a goblin, and he’s expert at ignoring that because that was when he wasn’t really _alive, _as he sees it.

He speaks through the door to all doors. They don’t know him as well as the sinks and stones at Hogwarts do, because he hasn’t spent as much time on the Hogwarts Express, but he introduces himself politely and asks if they’ll help him.

The doors are old, but that just means refined, and polite, and civilized. They agree with him that no one should be subject to Dementors, and that includes even the students on the train, who don’t always treat the doors well and slam them around and try to open them when they’re locked. A low song vibrates up and down the train.

Then all the doors slam at once.

That means they close on a lot of reaching Dementor arms and fingers. Harry grins and sits back down in his seat as he listens to Dementors shriek. Then the doors open and slam shut again, and are joined by the windows, who know a good thing when they see it. Dementor faces get slammed as the windows rattle in their panes. Dementor robes get caught and shredded. Children are protected from Dementors who were halfway into the compartments.

“Thank you,” Harry says, with a grateful bow of his head in the direction of their compartment door. He’s already noticed that Luna’s lips are a normal color and that she’s laughing in delight as she reaches out an arm to slide her fingers along the sill of their window.

The doors sing back in response, and it isn’t long until the lights come on again and then the train begins to move.

“That was wonderful,” Luna says. “I don’t know why more wizards and witches don’t listen to objects.”

“They just don’t listen in general,” Harry says gently. “They don’t listen to animals, either, and they don’t listen when I tell them I’m a goblin, and they don’t listen when you try to tell them what you hear.”

“It’s so sad,” Luna sighs.

Harry sits down next to her and puts his arm around her. “It is, but it’s not our problem to solve.”

_Moonlit Pebbled Strand_

“Aren’t you afraid because Sirius Black is after you?”

That’s the little Weasley girl, the one who was possessed by the diary last year. Harry doesn’t blame her for that, but he’s a little surprised that she came to talk to him, because mostly she seems to be scared of him. He smiles and lowers his book onto the library table. “Weren’t you afraid of that diary last year?”

Weasley flushes bright red and glances around frantically to see if anyone’s listening. But of course no one is. There’s an epidemic of not listening, something that Harry’s been thinking more and more about since his conversation with Luna on the train.

When she sees that, Weasley seems to be a little calmer. She sits down in the chair across from him and looks at him earnestly. “Not really. I thought I could handle it.”

“That’s sort of like me and Sirius Black,” Harry says, nodding. “Except that I know I can handle him, and so I’m not afraid.”

He tries to go back to his book, but Weasley is sitting there, shifting back and forth the way humans do when they’re trying to make up their minds. Harry decides he should wait patiently. He always has the complaints of the chair that Weasley is moving back and forth in to entertain him. It’s an old chair, and it mourns the last days when people sat calmly in it and there was the quiet turning of pages and no one tried to use it as a ladder to reach the top shelves.

“Is there something you need from me?” Harry asks, because he thinks it must be a need. No one would have sought him out if they just _wanted _something from him. Most people know better by now.

“Um. Can you teach me?”

“Teach you what? I’ve taught some people to understand objects, but they have to listen to them first—”

“I don’t think I could do object magic. Not after the diary.”

Harry puts aside his book and concentrates more fully on Weasley. That’s something with an amount of insight that he rarely hears from a human. “Then what is it?”

“I want to know how to defend myself. So I don’t have to roam around cringing in fear or waiting for the next disaster to happen and fall on my head.”

Harry nods thoughtfully as he thinks about it. He can understand why someone would want to be free of that fear, even though it’s been so long since he felt it himself that he doesn’t remember it. “Okay. Do you want lessons with the daggers? I can give you the same kind of training with dull blades that I learned. You can’t have metal blades until you’re better with them, though.”

“That’s more than I expected. Do you really think I can learn to handle daggers?”

Harry considers her carefully. She’s small and lean, although she’s taller than most goblins even at this age. “You have a knife-fighter’s build. You have to be small and quick. But you need to make sure that you’re really _committed _to learning this. It will mean not studying magic as much and lots of exercise and learning how to swim.”

“Swim? Why?”

“Because if you want to last in a fight, you’ll need stamina, and that’s a good source of exercise. And because if something goes wrong when you’re fighting, it’s good to have an alternate escape route.”

“That assumes I’m fighting next to a body of water, though.”

“Oh, of course,” Harry assures her. “But you might be, you know. It’s not as though you’ll have the same fights everywhere.”

After a moment, Weasley smiles, tentatively. “So when do we begin?”

*

“The water’s _cold_!”

“I know, but that just means that you need to learn how to endure it!” Harry calls as he watches Ginny surface and swim to the edge of the lake.

It took him a while to get used to calling her by her first name instead of her last one. He pointed out that he wasn’t really close with any of the Weasleys and he should be able to call her by her last name without it being confusing, and she pointed out Fred and George. Harry admitted it, but he was a little surprised. He hadn’t thought Fred and George had told their siblings about him.

It just seemed that friendships with goblins weren’t things wizards bragged about.

“Aren’t there spells that you use to make the water warmer?” Ginny’s clinging to the shore and shaking her wet hair out of her face, looking at him imploringly.

“I suppose I could use some,” Harry says, and casts a Warming Charm on her. Ginny sighs and relaxes cramped hands, and then goes back to swimming, which Harry is glad for. He doesn’t want her to get used to being coddled or anything. That’s not what makes a good knife-fighter, or any other kind.

“Didn’t you use some when you were learning to swim?” Ginny asks, ducking her head under the water.

“No, I was swimming in molten metal and underground, mostly. It was plenty warm.”

Ginny stares at him with her mouth open, which makes a little wave slap her in the face and cause her to splutter. Harry smiles at her and calls, “That’s why you need to keep your mouth shut when you’re swimming!”

Ginny swims back and forth another turn in their private little course, which Harry made by asking some stones to bob up and down, shutting off one part of the lake from the rest. Then she says, “You must have lived a fascinating life.”

Harry blinks. It’s the first time someone’s ever said that. He shrugs. “I suppose it was, but to me it just seems normal. It’s the kind of life that a goblin should live, although I had to have extra lessons because I’m a wizard, too.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

Harry smiles, pleased. He and Luna trade stories, but they’re mostly about the different languages that they can speak and the different creatures they can listen to. It’s nice to have someone who wants to know about the other parts. “Sure!”

And he sits on the lakeshore and tells Ginny about them, while the sky gets softer and darker above them.

_Stretches On For Ever_

“I heard Sirius Black attacked the portrait that guards the Gryffindor common room! Aren’t you afraid?”

Harry blinks at the Hufflepuff boy asking him the question. Harry recognizes him a little; his name is Ernie or something, and Harry thinks they’re in the same year. But the question doesn’t make much sense. “No, why would I be? I’m not a Gryffindor.”

“But he _attacked _the portrait! He got into the school!” Ernie Something’s eyes are wide, and he glances over his shoulder as if he thinks that Black is going to come up behind him and attack him, too.

Harry shrugs. “Either he’s so stupid that he doesn’t realize I’m not a Gryffindor and so I don’t need to be afraid of him. I can defend myself against anyone _that _stupid.”

“Or?” Ernie ducks and cowers this time, but the only thing moving is a shadow on the wall as someone passes nearby a suit of armor and shoves it a little. Harry winces. He almost feels bad, watching how much of a coward Ernie is.

“Or he has some cunning plan that’s going to take him a long time to execute. By the time he gets around to me, I’ll be ready to execute _him_.”

Ernie gives him a glance that’s almost as frightened as the one he gave the shadow, and runs away. Harry sighs. It’s hard, sometimes, being the only goblin in a school full of humans. Professor Flitwick is a comfort, and so is Luna, and Ginny is coming along well under his tutelage and is almost ready to start handling metal daggers, but at times like this, Harry can feel just how different he is from everyone else.

*

“I won’t have him scaring my badgers with stories!”

Harry is in the Headmaster’s office again, summoned there this time by a furious Professor Sprout. Ernie-the-scared went and spread stories in which Harry is going around trying to frighten people on purpose, evidently. Harry patiently sits in a chair and waits for the conversation to get around to him.

“Is it true that you told Ernie Macmillan that you were prepared to commit murder, Mr. Potter?” Dumbledore sounds weary. If he hadn’t already earned no grace from Harry, Harry would pity him. If dealing with ordinary students is hard, it’ll be much harder for him once the war begins.

“No. I just said I would execute Black if he came after me.”

“That is the same as being prepared to commit murder!” Professor Sprout is hanging onto her hat to keep it from flying away in the force of her outrage. Harry shakes his head at her. Imagine having to spare one hand to hang onto something like that. It would make you _useless _in battle.

“No. Execution and murder are different things. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have punished Sirius Black by sticking him in Azkaban, would you? You would say that he was the same thing as a Dementor who Kisses someone.”

“What do you know about Sirius Black, Mr. Potter?” Dumbledore is suddenly focused intently on him.

“Oh, that he’s a traitor and he broke out of Azkaban and he’s being hunted by Dementors.” Harry shrugs. “That’s it, really.”

“We do not want you to go after him, Mr. Potter, in an attempt to secure revenge for your parents.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because revenge appears to be an important part of goblin culture.”

Harry is torn between happiness that they finally accept he’s a goblin and exasperation at the way Dumbledore is approaching it. “With all due respect, someone is supposed to get her own revenge. My parents are dead and they can’t win it. If Black does something to me, I’ll execute him and that will be that. But other goblins help with someone’s revenge only when there are factors of power disparity and it’s really an insult to all goblins.”

It’s an attempt to warn Dumbledore, not that he deserves to be warned, but it streaks right past him. He’s still staring intently at Harry. “You do not intend to hunt down Sirius Black?”

“No.”

Dumbledore seems to slump a little. “Then you really do not care about your family.”

“I will have you know that I know all there is to know about my family, and all the different ways to honor them, with word and stone and song—”

“I _meant _your parents, Harry.”

Harry shrugs. “Then you should have said. I was talking about my family.”

Dumbledore looks tired, and Harry thinks he might have liked to dismiss the whole irritating pile of them from his office, but Professor Sprout interrupts with a shrill voice. “There is still the fact of his threatening my student, Headmaster!”

“Did you threaten Mr. Macmillan?”

“Who?”

“Ernie!” Professor Sprout stabs a finger at him. Harry thinks about telling her to back off if she doesn’t want to lose it, but that would probably get taken as a “threat,” too, instead of a statement of fact. “You threatened him when you said that you would execute Sirius Black!”

“Yes, but I didn’t threaten _him_,” Harry points out, as patiently as he possibly can.

“I have to say that it doesn’t sound as though he did, Pomona.” Dumbledore has an anticipatory gleam in his eyes, though, which means he thinks he’s found some other way to play the game. Harry wishes he would give that _up_ already. “Mr. Potter, maybe you can tell me something that I haven’t been able to understand.”

“Yes?” Harry thinks that it’s a bit rich for Dumbledore be asking this now, when so far he hasn’t made any _attempts _to understand, but he’s willing to try one last time.

“What is it about the Realm of Song that makes you so loyal to it? Most of our students feel a sense of wonder about Hogwarts, and many find their true home here, but I do not think you have.”

Harry smiles. “Hogwarts is wondrous, of course. And there are fascinating stones here with a lot to tell, and objects eager to help. But it just can’t compare to the Realm of Song.”

“Then please tell me about it.” Dumbledore leans forwards. Professor Sprout sniffs, and Dumbledore adds, “Tell _us_.”

Harry half-closes his eyes, because that always makes his recollections stronger, and lifts his voice in the soft half-chant that is the only goblin song he’s willing to sing in front of hostile humans. “It stretches on forever, down and down, through tunnels of basalt and beside lakes of molten gold. Rivers of mercury run through it. You can mine as much iron as you care to, and there is still more. The stone trembles with the half-forgotten music of the Deep Ones, and there are pools of silver that remember the moon that they were banished from long ago.

“And there is our song, the song of the goblins that has echoed here from the morning of days. The sound of the hammer on the forge, and the hand on the axe, and the chisel on the wall, and the water on the ground, and the feet on the earth, and the magic on the words. The tongue we have is ours, and it is what we use to sing, but we hear the voices of the others, as well. Objects and stones and animals and air. Everyone sings here.”

The words fade out into the silence of Dumbledore’s office, and Harry sighs as he is reminded yet again of sitting in a human building. The words have created a great longing in him to be back in the Realm of Song, where he could dip his hand in silver and sit beside one of the crystal pillars in the grove of enemy heads and know peace.

Dumbledore finally clears his throat. “That was a—powerful explanation,” he says in a subdued voice. “You’re free to go, Mr. Potter.”

It’s probably the most sensible thing Dumbledore has ever said. Harry leaves promptly, to give him the encouragement to go on saying such things.

He can still hear Professor Sprout complaining about him threatening her students, but oddly, Dumbledore doesn’t answer her.

_Where the Shadow Flows_

Harry leans back on his elbow next to the lake. He was supervising Ginny and Luna’s swimming training earlier, but both of them have gone to bed now. Harry will join them before too much longer. He’s just enjoying the reflection of the stars in the lake and thinking about how they remind him of the reflections of torches in the underground lakes at home.

A whine catches his attention. Harry can’t speak animal languages as well as Luna can, but he can recognize the sounds of a dog in distress. He turns and squints, making out a large black dog at last. He almost blends with the night. And he’s wagging his tail as he stares at Harry, but he’s also posed to run.

Harry grins at him. “Hi, boy. Do you want to come over and sit next to me? I think I still have some bacon left over from lunch.” He carries food all the time to practice transforming it into the kind of battle-rations that he’ll probably need when the war starts in earnest.

The dog runs straight up to him and tries to lick his face with a giant tongue. Harry laughs and dodges, and then takes out the bacon. The dog gulps it, almost taking his hand with it.

“Whoa, boy!” Harry concentrates hard and then does his best to speak in the wolf language that Luna has also been tutoring him in, ever since she discovered that part of their new Defense professor is a wolf and trying to reach out to people. Harry doesn’t know if a dog would be able to understand wolves, but they’re related and it’s worth a try. _Are you all right? _he asks, with movements of his ears that he has to make with his fingers.

The dog freezes, staring at him. His tongue hangs out, and he pants and whines, but Harry can’t understand anything from the sounds. It’s entirely possible that dogs can’t speak the dialect of wolves, after all, or else Harry isn’t advanced enough to get the message.

“Sorry,” Harry says, ruffling the dog’s fur on his head. “I’ve just started those lessons.”

The dog licks his face again and whines urgently. Harry looks around, but he doesn’t sense the approach of an enemy, which is what he thinks the dog is trying to say. He moves his fingers up to his ears again. _What’s your name?_

The dog shrinks back from him with his ears flattened to his head, and then Harry makes out the sound of footsteps. He turns around and smiles as this year’s Defense professor walks up to him. “Hello, Professor Lupin.”

“Harry.” Lupin sounds exasperated with him sometimes, but also fond, and Harry lets him get away with calling him by his first name because Lupin obviously isn’t completely human and it’s nice to have company. “What are you doing outside at night? There are dangers on the grounds.” He gives the dog a dubious glance.

The dog just glares back at Lupin with his tail cocked, and Harry chuckles. “I have my daggers, Professor. And I know a lot of magic. I would cut the head off anything that was actually a danger. I think this is just a dog, although he won’t tell me his name.”

Lupin blinks. “Do you mean—you were trying to guess what his previous owner must have called him?”

The dog growls a little. Harry doesn’t need to translate to know the dog is offended. He shakes his head. “No, my friend Luna has taught me a little about how to talk to dogs. I was trying that to ask him in his own language so that he could tell me and then I could translate it. But I’m not very good. It doesn’t help that I’m trying to speak in the language of wolves. Do you know how to make sense of his words, Professor?”

Lupin sounds like someone who’s just been told that he won’t make journeyman for another ten years. “What—what do you mean, Harry? Why would I know how to speak the language of wolves?”

“Because you’re part wolf.” Harry wrinkles his forehead. “How did you manage that, anyway? Did one of your parents change from a wolf into a human and then mate with a human? Or is it just that you’re a werewolf?”

Lupin turns and flees in the direction of the castle. Harry blinks after him. “That was weird,” he tells the dog, who has lain down with his head in Harry’s lap. “You’d think that he would be braver if he was a werewolf. Maybe he did have one wolf parent and he was just scared that I would be prejudiced against him.”

The dog licks Harry’s hand, and Harry is almost aware of snickers. He smiles and smooths down the black fur. “You still need a name, you know.”

The dog remains stubbornly silent, not acting as though he understands either English or the language of wolves. Harry shrugs. “Then I’ll call you Shadow, since you came out of them.”

Shadow barks his approval, so Harry pets his head again, and then sneaks his new friend into Hogwarts. Probably no one would actually get _upset _about him having a dog, but they get upset over everything else, so Harry doesn’t want to take the chance.

_Fled Before the Moon_

“Yes, you’re right about Professor Lupin,” Luna says, her brow furrowed as she stands next to Harry, waiting for the carriages that will take them to Hogsmeade station. “It’s amazing how clearly I can see what he is, but he acts as though he doesn’t want anyone to know it. Did you know that his boggart is the full moon?”

“Is _that _what that thing was?” Harry asks in surprise. He pets Shadow, who’s leaning against his leg. “I didn’t know that. He just seemed so surprised when nothing formed in front of me, and then I thought it was a crystal ball and he was afraid of Divination or something.”

Luna shakes her head decisively. “No, he’s a werewolf. But he’s afraid of acknowledging it. I tried to talk to him about it and told him that we’re fully accepting of people who were part-wolf, but he ran away from me.”

Harry frowns. That makes Lupin sound like a coward. He hopes that he doesn’t have to despise the man. That would be hard. Harry likes him, despite the intense questioning that followed the boggart class. Professor Lupin just doesn’t accept that Harry isn’t afraid of anything because he knows how to handle it.

“But you have to be afraid of _something_,” Lupin said, sounding like he was almost begging.

“There are things I wouldn’t like to have happen,” Harry admits. “Like someone trying to hurt my people or my friend Luna or my friend Ginny. But I know that I could cut off their heads if they tried, so that’s why I’m not afraid.”

“Harry, _cutting off heads _is not a solution to everything.”

“Why not?” Harry had asked that question since first year, and he was utterly willing to listen if he could find a human who would explain it to him. But like everyone else, Professor Lupin just gave up in despair.

Now, as they climb into the first of the carriages and say hello to the thestral pulling it, whose name is Black Hair Going Down the Spine in a Short Strip, Harry sighs. He doesn’t _mean _to cause people to despair, even if they are human. It’s like they’ve never thought about it themselves, and that’s why they can’t explain it to him.

“Are you all right, Harry?”

Luna is looking at him anxiously. Harry smiles at her and squeezes her hand. “I’m fine, Luna. I just think about the idiocy of humans, and it hurts.”

Luna nods. “That’s one reason I’ve often thought it would be better to be a Kneazle. Did you know that they don’t doubt themselves, and if you speak their language, they will tell you about all their theories of life”

“Then I want to learn Kneazle when we get back from the holidays. I’m not making much progress with Wolf.” Harry frowns down at Shadow, who’s curled up at his feet. Shadow woofs at him. “Or Dog.”

“It’s not your fault, Harry. You can’t communicate with someone who won’t say anything.”

“You think that’s what’s happening with Shadow? Why?”

“I think he should explain that to you, Harry. Just make it safe, and everything will be all right.”

*

Harry comes back from the goblins’ New Year celebration—involving the burning of silver and gold, and held a day before the humans’ New Year celebration, which got stolen from theirs—with a smile. Then he opens his door and finds a wizard standing in the middle of Harry’s room, clutching a sheet to himself.

Harry raises his eyebrows. “Is that what Luna meant? You’re Sirius Black, and you were Shadow?”

Black shuts his mouth and just stares at him. “How can you—you can react so _calmly_?”

“I’m a goblin.” Harry sits down next to Sirius on the bed. “All right, talk to me and tell me why you’re really here and what was done to you. Since you’re not a mass murderer who’s trying to kill me right now, that probably means that you aren’t a mass murderer at all. And you could have told me that you were named after a star, you know. Indicated it somehow.”

Sirius blinks and looks bewildered. But he tells Harry the truth, slowly, and Harry thinks hard about what he says, and comes to one inescapable conclusion at the end of the night when Sirius has turned back into Shadow and is snoring on the bed next to him.

It looks as though the next goblin war is, regrettably, going to have to include Voldemort.

**The End.**


End file.
